


We've Been Here Before

by DyrneKeeper



Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 06:30:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/671372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DyrneKeeper/pseuds/DyrneKeeper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blaine's sociology professor tells them to be careful of explanations of infinite regress and that just because something happened before something else doesn't mean it caused it. But Blaine is fairly positive that exactly how much his life sucks right now can be blamed on the Dutch and the Puritans and the butterfly that flapped its wings in Tokyo and sent western Ohio the worst heat wave on record the first week of August.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We've Been Here Before

Blaine's sociology professor tells them to be careful of explanations of infinite regress and that just because something happened before something else doesn't mean it caused it. Sitting in the fluorescent-lit lecture hall, sweating in the heat of a scorching Indian summer, Blaine's not so sure. He's fairly positive that exactly how much his life sucks right now can be blamed on the Dutch and the Puritans and the butterfly that flapped its wings in Tokyo and sent western Ohio the worst heat wave on record the first week of August.

-

Even with the air conditioning on it still feels hot in Kurt's living room, humidity leaking in around the door frame and making it feel as though the air is water that will rise and drown them. They're making plans, at least Kurt is, for packing and moving and helping each other pack and move because despite all of their amazing plans last year they're not going to the same school, they're not even going to be in the same state, and that means Kurt is in full logistics mode.

“Dad's going to use the truck but Finn said he wanted to come, too, so it's still going to be a little bit tight, but if you can come over on the--” He flips a page over, checks a date. “--the eighteenth, that's a Monday, we can get everything in and then we can help you on Tuesday...”

It irritates Blaine, that Kurt is taking his help for granted this way, like he'd spend a day in this awful August heat lugging boxes around for his boyfriend without even needing to be asked, and the fact that he would does nothing to ease his annoyance. It still feels like he's being abandoned, with Kurt going off to New York City without him, even though Blaine had chosen to go to Boston. It's not as if he'd expected Kurt to follow after him, not when he'd dreamed of going to New York for so long (except that he had, in a secret corner of his mind; Blaine had hoped that he, that what they had together, would be enough for Kurt, that if it came to the choice between the stage and love Kurt would choose him). It's not like Boston and New York are even that far apart, but they've barely gone a day since they met without seeing each other, or at least knowing they could see each other. But it's at least five hours by bus between Boston and New York, and that's only when they actually have the time to take a weekend and visit, because classes are going to be harder and both of them are addicted to extracurriculars.

“You know,” Kurt says snippily, fanning himself with an alphabetized packing list, “this would be a lot easier if you weren't taking your entire record collection.”

“At least my clothes all fit in one suitcase,” Blaine snaps back.

And suddenly it's one of those fights and neither of them can really remember what it was about to begin with, but by the end it's about everything and their voices rise loud enough to drown the pointed scrape and click of Finn shoving his door shut.

Somehow they can't stop themselves, because the thought of being apart just hurts too much in a new way that they don't know how to deal with and fighting seems somehow better. They're boys and they're eighteen and logic and relationships are neither of their strong suits. It's big and messy and dramatic because they are big and messy and dramatic, and because if they bring out the best in each other they can bring out the worst, too; Kurt, bitingly sarcastic and manipulative and intolerant; Blaine, loud and condescending and willfully misunderstanding.

It's about uniforms and fitting in and shouting too loud and how Kurt sang his first duet senior year with Sam instead of Blaine (Oh my God, you've got to be kidding me) and the papers and the jackets Blaine forgets in the back of Kurt's car and you don't care about what I want to do and God what is wrong with you and why do I even--

It's to his credit, Blaine thinks as he stalks out to his car and slams the door shut, that he has no illusions that this is just going to blow over.

It will take him weeks, once the anger fades to shame and hurt, to realize just what not blowing over means.

It means no Saturday afternoon dates at the Lima Bean. It means missing the revival theater's summer festival because it's just too pathetic to go alone. It means putting down the phone a dozen times a day, halfway through a text he can't send anymore. It means sexual frustration and guilt that he can't get Kurt out of his body as easily as he can out of his mind, and he can't get Kurt of of his mind at all.

Mostly, though, it just means loneliness.

It means a Kurt-shaped hole in his days and his life and the feeling that the angle of gravity shifted and its pulling him down in ways he doesn't know how to fight.

It means scavenging for cardboard boxes and packing for college alone, because nothing is secret among the McKinley kids and the Glee club has all taken Kurt's side. They might have all graduated together, but Kurt was theirs first.

He hates it even if he sort of understands it. And so it's with shock when he goes out to get the mail one scorching afternoon to find Rachel just pulling into the driveway.

"Don't worry, I've had lots of experience dealing with school-traitor heartbreakers before,” she says, when Blaine worries she'll bring the wrath of the New Directions alumni down on herself, and Blaine's mouth falls open because she does not get to compare him to Jesse. "Given the pain of my past experiences no one will suspect me of interfering in their righteous ostracizing.” Blaine thinks, but doesn't say, that Rachel's past experiences are exactly what's going to make everyone suspect she'd do something like this. But, utter lack of tact aside, he's grateful for her company as he sorts through his clothes and books and the assortment of secondhand appliances he's been picking up at garage sales. Some of them, he notes, with a glance at a retro clock (“The word is tacky, Blaine”) with Kurt.

Once everything is boxed and the boxes are sealed with packing tape that tries to stick to everything except what they want it to and labeled (Rachel's admittedly brilliant suggestion) they go out for ice cream in the sticky August twilight and sit in companionable silence until the sun sets and the streetlights flicker on. Rachel leaves to drive home only when the mosquitoes have become truly intolerable, and it's only after she pulls out of the driveway, blinking her headlights at him standing next to his packed sedan, that he realizes she hadn't mentioned Kurt once.

-

Boston is big and bewildering for a kid who's spent his life in Anytown, Ohio, but it's exciting, too, and there are things to learn and groups to audition for and if he spends late nights writing mopey songs during the time he's used to calling Kurt, well, no one ever needs to know that. Soon even his late-night time is filled, as he makes friends with the other students on his floor.

And then there's Matt, the handsome dark-eyed boy in his freshman writing seminar, and Blaine wonders if he should be noticing a pattern; the Gap's youngest junior manager, Dalton (and McKinley's) prize countertenor, and the boy with freckled hands who makes even the grumpy old professor sigh in approval.

No one would ever dream of telling Matt not to try so hard, Blaine thinks, watching him read aloud from the paper in front of him, double-spaced twelve-point font too prosaic to hold the souls of the words it contains, because what Matt can do is not something the rest of them can understand, and he knows it and—here is the difference—they know it too. Where Kurt was shouted down, his brilliance unique and confusing, Matt fits a type of genius and he is embraced.

-

“...and that's Kurt,” he says, tapping a finger against the photo, Matt close against his side as he “introduces” the people in those white-bordered photographs. He keeps his voice flat and controlled, nonchalant, just another Glee kid. He thinks he's done well and reminds himself that it's still too early for full disclosure. He thinks that Matt won't notice the omission of the so-complicated-it-needs-flowcharts explanation all his other friends have gotten, but Matt is a writer, and he knows what ellipses mean.

-

At first, what they don't have in common is exciting. Blaine finds himself paying more attention in his American Lit class than he ever has to an English class before and checking new books out of the library so Matt will see them on his desk or in his bag and ask about them and glow with excitement at having something to talk about.

Matt goes with Blaine to the music store on Saturday afternoons and outdoor concerts in the park on Thursday night, snuggled up and shivering, a thermos of hot chocolate between them, sitting closer and closer together as the sun and summer go down. And Blaine goes with Matt to used book stores and poetry jams (“People still do that?” Blaine hears, in a high voice he wishes he didn't remember). “If it's important to you, it's important to me,” Matt had said one Thursday afternoon, browsing that night's concert program, and Blaine feels a wash of satisfaction at having such a grown-up relationship.

Blaine isn't naive or romantic enough to think that he'd never be able to be happy with someone who isn't a singer or a musician, and he tells himself he just has to work harder to get past their differences. But there is something missing between him and Matt (If he had asked, Rachel, remembering a late night conversation with Kurt, would have told him it was chemistry).

-

He goes with Rachel to see him in their program's spring concert sometime in April. It's a terrible idea and he knows it but he misses listening to music outside of his limited circle of friends from choir—and Rachel is very persuasive. “It's not about Kurt,” she says, blunt and tactless as always, when he raises a final feeble objection, though neither of them fully believe what she's saying. “But our program is one of the best in the state and you should at least be scoping out the competition.” Blaine doesn't have the heart to remind her that their schools don't actually compete anymore before he agrees and hangs up the phone.

-

He doesn't know what he thinks is going to happen. But when he tells Matt he's going to be gone next weekend he doesn't mention Kurt.

-

He takes the bus to New York and it is an awful ride, cramped and loud, and when Rachel meets him at Penn Station he's cranky and tired and smells like bus, but she pulls him into a tight hug and her familiar presence is—not a word he ever expected to apply to Rachel—calming.

At the theater they sit in the back and listen and whisper judgment, sometimes catty, sometimes approving, under their breaths to each other during the breaks for applause. As the groups and numbers pass Blaine's attention drifts and wanders, his nerves balling themselves up in anticipation of seeing the person whose name is listed under the last group performing that evening.

When the stage goes black after the second to last group, Blaine's stomach nearly bottoms out. He notices but doesn't really feel Rachel's cold fingers squeezing his hand on their shared armrest, and he's too distracted to wonder (for the fiftieth time) what exactly her angle was in bringing him here. Then the lights flip back on, instant night to instant day, and the curtain draws open.

And there he is.

He's never been one to blend in, in a hallway or on stage where everyone's costume (or uniform) is as bright as his, and Blaine's eyes find him instant. His hair is shorter, is the first thing he notices; shorter and sort of—spiky? He might have gotten taller, too, it's hard to tell from here; but he's definitely thinner.

His ears strain but Kurt's high, unique voice is well trained to blend even if he himself is not and Blaine can't separate it from the voices of the others. It's not until their third selection that he suddenly hears it breaking away from the others for a solo that Kurt probably thinks is far too short for his talent, and as the countertenor vibrates the air between his lips and Blaine's ears, Blaine expects something hit him—pleasant, familiar shock at the power and beauty of that voice, or at the beauty of the singer, a thousand regrets for letting him go or making him leave or whatever the hell it was that had happened between them, anger that Kurt hadn't cared enough to give him—them—a second chance, but—

He feels nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Kurt is a glorious performer, Blaine's never been in doubt about that and is reminded all over again as he watches him. But his face is pale under the harsh stage lights and where Blaine had expected to see the familiar flush high on his cheekbones or the sparkle in his eyes as Kurt commands his audience—and he does—he feels only like he's watching a stranger—a beautiful, controlled, talented stranger—on that stage, some cool facade wrapped so tightly around himself that Blaine wonders if he'd just imagined Kurt being anything else.

He wonders if Rachel notices it, wonders if he'd made up everything he'd been terrified of seeing tonight (and now realizes, with a flat falling sensation as the image of Matt flares in his head, that he had wanted desperately to see tonight) in his head. He must have—because watching Kurt, Blaine doesn't see the boy he used to love (the past tense hits him, really hits him, for the first time, like being punched). He sees what everyone else sees: a tall thin boy with brown hair and high cheekbones and a voice that's sliding smoothly over the soprano's part of some old classic show tune. And nothing else.

-  
He calls Matt that night, crouched on the top step of the stairwell in Rachel's dorm, pitching his voice low so it doesn't echo off the painted concrete walls. Matt is whispering, too; Blaine has interrupted him in the library and could Matt call him back in an hour? Blaine says sure and love you and the concert was great, tell you more later, and goodnight, because he knows Matt won't really call back, he'll get lost in his work and lose track of time and Blaine tells himself he doesn't mind.

And so he ends up face down on Rachel's bed while Rachel pats his hair awkwardly and her roommate—Tiffany? Stephanie?—looks askance at him.

He hadn't realized until then just how much of Kurt's memory he'd been hanging onto, clinging to, until it was gone. And it is gone. Guilt gone, emotions gone, temptation gone. The Kurt-shaped hole he has had in his life since last August, that he's expected and feared would be dug a little deeper tonight, is now just flat ground, the story of their time together a piece of white paper erased clean.

-

Back at school, he throws himself into his classes and his own music and Matt, and decides he's falling even more in love with the dark-eyed boy as he skips choir practice to watch him rehearse a reading.

It's not that all of his memories of Kurt are suddenly gone; it's just that they're suddenly missing all meaning. Little things still remind him of Kurt, but without any pang: the taste of coffee and the melodies of Wicked, the same way chai tea reminds him of Wes and irises make him think of his grandmother.

This goes on for three weeks before he realizes what it means: he's over Kurt.

He misses the feeling of something missing.

-

Over the summer he's out of contact with everyone, working a job his aunt found for him and living with his cousin Chelsea. He's lonely again in a strange city for the first few weeks and absence really does seem to make the heart grow fonder; they still talk and text and visit some weekends, but there's a tension there that wasn't there before as the hot, sweaty weeks slide by, or maybe it's a lack of tension, and Blaine likes lying on Chelsea's couch next to Matt, but he can't fight the faint prickle of anger at the sneer in Matt's voice as he makes fun of one of Blaine's favorite books and tells him he'll bring out some real reading material next time. The one night Blaine misses Matt's call one night because he's out on the back porch with Chelsea and his guitar and he's tired and mosquito-bitten and doesn’t call back. For the first time he doesn't look forward to Matt's next visit. He tells himself it's the heat, the tiredness and the snippishness that comes when the thermometers rise.

By the time he packs up his suitcase (somehow much more full than when he'd first come here in May) in the last week of July, they're only talking every couple of days, and it only bothers Blaine in that it...doesn't, really. Not like this time last year, when he and Kurt had been desperate for minutes together, terrified of the separation that loomed ahead of them, threatening to ruin the time they had left.

When he gets back hom, he knows that they're falling apart. And yet somehow they don't, despite the passive aggressive arguments over the car radio (is Blaine really the kind of guy who gets into passive aggressive fights over the car radio? He discovers to his dismay that he is) and the way that "if it's important to you it's important to me" seems to have gone completely out the window, for both of them. Blaine misses readings and Matt cancels concert dates and Blaine doesn't miss how Matt doesn't even seem to mind not having Blaine by his side, that somehow having his boyfriend with him would ruin the image of the angsty, lonely starving artist he tries to project.

The first week in August Blaine tries to pick a fight, and there's a few harsh words on either side and then somehow his voice breaks and so does Matt's and he ends up in Mat's arms somehow, being soothed and assured that it's alright and they're going to be fine because Matt has the power of words and that means he takes control, and Blaine hates it because he feels powerless against it

-

He wonders what it means, if it means anything at all, that Kurt gave them up when he seemed to want them so badly, and Matt won't let go even when it seems he doesn't want them at all.

-

It takes two more weeks and several visits to Rachel to finally end it, because no one he knows can sabotage a relationship quite as efficiently as Rachel can. “I suppose I should be offended at your request,” she says primly, wiping condensation off her glass of iced tea with a thumb, “but at least someone recognizes the artistic value of the pain I have suffered.”

“It's not that he's a bad guy,” Blaine tells her, because he's not, they're just incompatible, their souls playing in different keys.

“I know,” Rachel says suddenly, more softly, reaching out and putting her hand on his in one of those rare but patented Rachel Berry moments of insight and empathy that every so often remind him that, underneath all the self-involved diva she is, in fact, a human being. “You're just....out of tune with each other.” And Blaine is instantly terrified that Rachel really does have that sixth sense she's always claimed to have.

But one does not face bullies and slurs and Rachel without developing some level of courage in the face of the implacable, and Blaine finally finds it and ends it the last week before they're all leaving to go back to school. As he walks away, leaving a dejected Matt in his wake that's somehow so much worse than an angry one, Blaine feels only a sense of relief, the way a thunderstorm clears the heavy summer air.

-

When he wakes up the next morning, though, he's miserable.

"Of course, it's perfectly normal," Rachel assures him. "No matter how disastrous a relationship is, you have to mourn it," and if Blaine had the energy at the moment he'd protest the "disastrous" part, though it probably won't have done him much good anyway as she plows on. "For instance, after our brief tempestuous affair I grieved for the loss of our fleeting connection despite how incompatible with me you turned out to be," and why is he taking relationship advice from this girl again, really?

"Come over this afternoon and help me pack," she orders. "Finn disappeared with Puckerman and I need someone to help with the heavy boxes. Keeping busy is a crucial part of the healthy mourning process."

Showering that night, washing away dust and sweat, Blaine wonders if he's been blaming too much on the heat.

-

At first, school is strange without Matt's more or less constant presence, but sophomore classes are harder and withing a few weeks he's settled into a dull if (mostly) productive grind of class and library and choir practice (and Blaine's fairly certain that he's the only one on his floor for whom that's not a euphemism).

So when Rachel invites him, early in November, to her fall recital Blaine doesn't think twice before accepting. Any fear or hope he has of seeing Kurt is long past; the concert last spring took care of that, he thinks.

-

Exhausted from his own grind of midterms he falls asleep on Rachel's floor the afternoon of the recital and when he wakes up she's gone already, but she's pinned a note with directions to the theater on his bag. He showers and changes into something that doesn't scream that he's been living in a library for the past month and makes the short walk to the theater. He gets there early, too early, it turns out, because the time Rachel gave him is off by an hour. The theater isn't even open yet, so he wanders down a stairwell to the backstage, a warren of hallways and dressing rooms and practice rooms with a vague idea of finding Rachel. He's grateful for whatever squeaky-clean vibes he seems to give off wherever he goes, because even the notoriously paranoid crew, darting around in back t-shirts and headsets, don't give him a second glace. It's only after several minutes of increasingly aimless wandering through a maze of cinderblock hallways that all look that same that he realizes he is completely lost. Not wanting to stop and admit his trespass to anyone by asking for directions, he's rounding what he thinks is the same corner for the third time when he hears it.

His first thought is that he hates Rachel, because somehow this is all her fault.

He loses track of his thoughts after that.

It's a voice, but not a voice, the voice, a sweet strong countertenor that's climbing the final notes of an arpeggio and then a pause, silence for an aching moment and then it begins again, dipping into a soaring solo piece that Blaine knew once in a former life but can't recall now that the world outside of his ears and his metronome heart has ceased to exist. It's not “Blackbird,” but it might as well be, and Blaine shudders under that same sensation (a curtain opening onto a broad new scene, the world slipping sideways) and without realizing it he puts out a hand against the slick textured surface of the wall. He feels the flimsy cover torn off the hole he'd thought was filled; he sees the light shift and the blank erased page is suddenly awash in color, and he is pretty sure he has forgotten how to breathe.

"Oh, there you are!"

Then, the ground really feels like it's falling open, and he spins around so fast his shoes squeal on the linoleum tile to see—Rachel, apparently oblivious to the epiphany he's having , that voice still hanging in the air, surrounding Blaine, like suffocation, like oxygen. She grabs his hand and begins dragging him down the hall. "You're not supposed to be in here, how did you get in here? The show's almost starting, you're going to miss it and I am not missing my cue, even for you, Blaine Warbler," and somehow it takes her fifteen seconds to navigate the way out of the labyrinth Blaine's been lost in for half an hour, and he wonders in the small part of the brain he has left to wonder such things how she can exist in the same universe as that voice and remain so fucking clueless. But as she deposits him at the side door of the theater and stands on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek, Blaine sees a flash of something in her eyes that make him curse whoever thought it was a good idea to give Rachel Berry acting lessons.

 

He spends the first half of the recital sitting in a daze, not hearing any of the performances and clapping at the appropriate moments only out of instinct. In the shocked rush of trying to find a seat before the house lights went down he had missed getting a program, and now has no idea when Kurt will be on or what he's going to sing, and if the shock hasn't killed him yet he thinks the suspense just might.

The second act is exactly long enough for Blaine to imagine in increasingly excruciating detail exactly all the ways this could go horribly wrong. Kurt could still be angry at him. Kurt might be totally over him. Kurt could be seeing someone else. Blaine might have imagined the last two years of high school and the last two hours and Kurt could just be a vibrant, beautiful figment of his imagination...

When he gets to that point, he realizes he has, in fact, wigged out.

Finally, the lights come up on a pale slender young man, and Blaine wonders, not for the first time in his life, where his eyes were the last time he saw him, because he's certain Kurt's the most beautiful boy he's ever seen. Kurt's face is flushed, excited, under the lights, and his gaze sweeps the audience with a look that is both intense and entirely at ease. Blaine is fairly certain that Kurt no longer gets nervous before a solo.

When the pit orchestra picks up the first few notes of the song Blaine's tension nearly breaks in a laugh, surprised and delighted, but then Kurt opens his mouth and everything else disappears.

It won't be easy, you'll think it strange...

There's a whisper from the audience, faint shiftings and "boy that kid has a funny voice" from somewhere behind him, but it only lasts a moment before the rest of the theater falls into rapt silence. Blaine only has eyes—and ears—for Kurt, and he's thinking of pleading deafness or temporary insanity for not seeing anything before. He is beyond moved; he is shaken.

He remembers the first time he'd heard hear him sing that song, to an audience that was receptive but that didn't get it, didn't get him, and Blaine wondered who it was, what model it was Kurt had been told he had to fit in here, last spring, in order to make it. He wondered if they'd learned, as he had, that there was no fitting Kurt into anyone's mold, or if it had made them love Kurt, as Blaine had, and if it had made them lose Kurt too, like Blaine had, but not because Blaine hadn't understood Kurt Hummel; because he'd forgotten who he was.

I had to let it happen, I had to change

He imagines the moment of Kurt shedding his feathers again, molting again into something new and glorious, and knows that finding yourself isn't something Kurt has to do only once in his life; he has to do it over and over again, every day and in every school and every job, because everyone is always going to want to make him into something else, and Kurt is the only person he knows who will beat them all, every time. And Blaine wants to be with him, watch him transform the world around him as he grows into the role he's writing for himself.

I kept my promise, don't keep your distance

Blaine isn't sure how he threads himself through the chattering crowd starting to ooze out of the theater into the cold autumn night that blows the smell of exhaust and city through the doors of the building or threads his way through the backstage corridors but before he realizes what he's doing he's standing outside the dressing room door, the final verse, Kurt's voice, echoing in his ears.

The answer was here all the time.

Kurt's alone, seated at a long counter littered with empty water bottles and overturned cans of hairspray. His back is to Blaine and the mirror doesn't face the floor so he doesn't notice him; he's dabbing stage makeup off, his head tilted to expose the pale vulnerability of his throat, and the sight of him, so close, takes Blaine's breath away.

And Blaine has no idea what to do now. He hadn't really planned this far ahead; in his mind things sort of leaped forward to the next hour or day or god, year, when everything was settled and solved.

As it happens, though, he doesn't have to decide what to do. There's a crash from the room next door, the clatter of a chair tipping over, muffled shouts and laughter and Kurt's head turns towards the noise, towards the door, toward Blaine standing in the frame.

He can see every emotion that flashes across Kurt's face—startlement deepening to shock, confusion, wariness. Kurt's eyes could never hide anything. Blaine shifts his weight, puts his hands in his jacket pockets, takes them out again. “...hi,” he finally says, far too late, when the silence had already stretched from surprised to awkward. Kurt's eyes flick over his face and Blaine doesn't know if this is stage-Kurt or real-Kurt until he snorts and turns away, muttering, “I'm going to kill Rachel.”

Kurt's hands are steady as they put away his sponges and his makeup remover and zip up the case, but his chest rises and falls unsteadily and Blaine would give his soul to know if that's a good or a bad sign. He just feels like this isn't how a romantic reunion is supposed to go at all.

"How's Matt?" Kurt asks, leaning over his bag and fastening the clasp and Blaine doesn't wonder how Kurt knows about Matt because oh.

"I don't know, we broke up." Kurt's head is still down, so Blaine can't see his face, but he must not be completely displeased with that answer because he speaks again. "Where are you staying?"

"With Rachel," they say together, Kurt answering his own question with exasperated fondness. "And no. No you are not. No man should have to face those harpies for a night." His tone is closer to light than it has been all night. “We'll find you a place that's humane.”

"Stephanie's not that bad," Blaine defends her automatically, because he feels like he should, but because as much as he sort of agrees with Kurt's assessment of Rachel's roommate, he also does like her, sort of.

"You've actually met her?" Kurt's eyebrows go up as he stands up, holding the strap of his bag loosely in his fingers.

“I stayed with them last year,” Blaine says. "When I came up for your spring recital."

Kurt freezes in the middle of slinging the bag over his shoulder. "You did." It's not a question, but Blaine feels like it deserves an answer. He shrugs in an embarrassed sort of way and gives a small smile and is rewarded when Kurt smiles back, just a little, something shy dancing out of the corners of his eyes.

“Can I?” Blaine holds out a hand, offering to take Kurt's bag, because he feels like its what he's supposed to do, but Kurt shakes his head, wraps his fingers around the strap, issues a short “No thanks, I've got it.” He does let Blaine hold the door for him, though, before they fall into step beside each other, Blaine shoving his hands back into his pockets (tomorrow he'll realize he left his gloves in the theater). Kurt nods and waves to a few people on the sidewalk as they leave the building, and Blaine feels out of place, completely unsure of his welcome here, and Kurt is giving him nothing, unless—and he can't be sure—he's catching Kurt steal glances at him out of the corner of his eye—glances Blaine only suspects because he's stealing his own, too, paying no attention to the bright lights and blaring horns of the city that never sleeps.

-

“Do you want coffee or anything?” Kurt asks after he's unlocked his door and set his bag on his desk and hung both their coats in the closet—little gestures, familiar gestures that feel unnatural in their naturalness; it's been too long for it to be this easy or this hard. “Carole gave me a beautiful French press for Christmas.” He cocks his head at Blaine, demanding an answer before he betrays himself with any mindless bustling. What the hell was Blaine doing here, looking like a ghost and like a faulty memory—a little leaner, hair a little longer—than the last time he'd seen him and so much like Blaine that Kurt has never regretted that fight as much as he does right now. But real life is never as straightforward as it is in his beloved romantic comedies, so when Blaine just stands there awkwardly by the door after muttering a “Yeah, thanks,” Kurt takes pity on him and waves him to the chair at his desk.

Kurt had regretted everything he said as soon as Blaine had stormed out, but at first he was too proud and then he was too stubborn to try to fix things, and when Blaine had never called or even texted when he finally left for school—he found out from Rachel, accidentally, that he'd finally left—he'd decided that Blaine had really wanted to end things and that—was that.

At school Rachel had tried to set him up with boys from her acting classes, all of which ended more or less disastrously before she gave him up as a lost cause and there were both too busy with school to argue much about it. Rachel's own dating life A.F. (After Finn) is just as unsuccessful, but they have each other to lean on, so life in a strange city isn't as lonely as it could have been. Except now, he's going to kill Rachel, because he's not sure exactly how but somehow this is all her fault, that he's standing at his desk waiting for water to boil and mixing sugar into a cup the way he hates that he remembers that Blaine likes, because it makes him remember all the good times they had together, how good they were together and then how his world had broken a little when he'd realized that good together didn't necessarily mean forever. Though he'd be lying if he said his heart wasn't pounding uncomfortably loud in his ears, wondering if, because he was here, maybe it meant that it could.

Kurt pours a mug of coffee and hands it to Blaine where he sits in Kurt's desk chair before taking his own mug and sitting primly on the edge of his bed. Blaine can't help feeling the weird sense of surreality he remembers from moving into his first dorm room, looking around at Kurt's. Some things are new, some things he remembers from Kurt's room at home, but everything looks a little different, a little alien, in this tiny single crammed at the end of a long hallway in this beehive of a building.

Everything, that is, except the boy siting across from him, legs crossed, blowing steam off his coffee.

“Why did you come?” Kurt demands softly, his eyes wide on Blaine's over the edge of the mug

"To see Rachel," Blaine admits, "I don't know you were singing tonight too," and it's mostly true—he didn't know.

"Mm," Kurt hums, “She can still blow the walls off of buildings—I don't tell her that, though, so don't give my secret away.” He smiles fondly and Blaine laughs because he knows how close Kurt and Rachel really are, how close they always have been, and Kurt's eyes meet his in a grin before they remember they're not supposed to be like this together anymore, and they glance away awkwardly, Blaine's hands shaking suddenly. He rests his mug on his knee and wraps his fingers around it and doesn't admit that he has absolutely no recollection of seeing Rachel perform tonight. And the thought of Rachel performing leads to the memory of Kurt performing , a thousand memories of watching Kurt perform, and suddenly he can't stand it, sitting here like old friends, a little open but a little bit tense like they really have gotten over each other (and maybe Kurt really has) and have nothing left to say to each other and before he can stop himself the words are out of his mouth. "Kurt, I didn't realize what I was missing until tonight."

Kurt's eyes are illegible as he sits on the bed foot tapping softly to an unheard beat. “Concerts? Blaine, you're in choir at your school, I know for a fact..."

"Not concerts, " Blaine interrupts, because Kurt feels so solid and real, only three feet away from him, that he must be unreal, and if he's going to vanish or Blaine's going to wake up in his own bed he wants to say this first. "You."

The movement of Kurt's foot stops and for a moment he stares at Blaine, eyes wide, face pale, and he looks like he's seventeen again. But Kurt's older now and more confident and bolder and isn't going to quietly let Blaine hang himself this time.

"We've been here before," he says, and there's an edge to his voice that Blaine doesn't remember hearing before, and he wonders with a fresh pang that he's the reason Kurt can sound like that. "And we know how it ends." And after nearly two years it's not fair that they can understand each other so well to know what they're both talking about and yet sill have absolutely no idea.

"No!" Blaine almost shouts, hands reaching for Kurt but he pulls them back, because he's been terrified of rejection for hours now but it's so much worse to sit and stare rejection in the (pale, wide-eyed, beautiful) face. "No, we don't know how it—God, I was such an idiot. I don't know how I ever let you go,” and he's on the verge of rambling now, so he swallows and tries to meet Kurt's eyes but it's hard.

“I'm still mad at you,” Kurt says, and it's a test and his heart skips a beat as Blaine's eyes widen, his face falls from schooled neutrality into something that Kurt is almost willing to call disappointment. And it's probably not fair to test him, not now, not when Blaine literally just said he wanted him back, but it's been so long and it hurt so much the first time that Kurt doesn't want to jump into this again until he is absolutely sure (but once he is sure, oh, once he is...)

“I'm still mad at you, too,” Blaine says, and it hangs there in the air, honest and vulnerable but razor edged (and they'd learned the hard way that painfully honest with each other didn't mean brutally honest) and the balance can tip either way and Kurt knows somehow, that if he doesn't make the first push Blaine will step back, that the chance will be gone and god knows when they'll ever get another.

“I'm sorry,” Kurt says, and he means it. For everything.

Kurt's eyes are wide again, and softer, and after fifteen months and two hundred miles it's so easy to take half a second and cross three feet of space.

Kurt's lips are soft under his and his skin is damp under his fingertips and when a shudder runs through his body Blaine realizes that it's because he's crying and tires to pull back, truly terrified now, but Kurt's hands curl around his shoulders, keeping their bodies pressed together, his mouth opening against Blaine's and as their tongues caress and collide Blaine realizes he's crying, too, and laughing, and they cling to each other, a shaky, teary, smiling mess.

“I'm sorry, too,” Blaine admits, what feels like hours later, petting softly at Kurt's hair with one hand, and Kurt smiles and shifts his arm around Blaine's waist to hold him closer.

“I thought about calling you. So many times.”

“Why didn't you?

“I saw you with Matt.”

“I thought I was over you.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I heard you singing.”

A pause, silence, but it's comfortable this time, familiar, and Kurt nuzzles Blaine's shoulder, breathes words against his skin that make both of their hearts stop, and it feels like sunrise, the first birdsong of spring in November, a second chance, as Blaine kisses his mouth and whispers against his lips I love you too.

They sleep curled up together in Kurt's narrow dorm room bed, elated and exhausted, just as a cold gray light starts to creep in through the curtains. He wakes up to the chime of Kurt's alarm a few hours later, feeling more well rested than he has in months.

-

Blaine looks sheepish and Kurt looks triumphant and Rachel looks smug when she sees them enter the door to the diner where some of the performers from last night are meeting for brunch, hand-in-hand. Kurt introduces him to his choirmates as “my boyfriend,” and Blaine is amused to see not one but two faces fall subtlety in disappointment. He squeezes Kurt's hand more tightly, so happy that Kurt chose to be with him, again, that it's a little overwhelming. He can feel himself glowing, and it feels normal and it feels right, like the last two years were only a bad dream already beginning to fade.

-Epilogue-

“It can't possibly be this hot. No, really, the world will melt, Blaine, if it keeps being this hot.” Kurt is stretched out in the shade, arm flung over his eyes and wriggling uncomfortably as the dry grass itches on his sweaty skin. It's a testament to exactly how miserable it is that he doesn't even care about wrinkling his shirt right now. Blaine grins at him, rotating his wrist to fan Kurt with the paperback whose literary merits he's been ignoring for the last hour in favor of its preeminent usefulness as a cooling device. “Just think of it as a sauna,” he says, lips quirking at the sigh of pleasure his boyfriend gives at even that feeble relief from the heat. “Relaxing, beneficial for your health...”

“We could get sunstroke, heat exhaustion...” Kurt protests, opening an eye to glare at Blaine, and he's so adorable when he's complaining like this that Blaine can't help but lean over and kiss him. It should be too hot to do anything but lie quietly in the shade and melt, but the warmth of Kurt's mouth is welcoming and the way his fingers twine through Blaine's curls, holding him in place, is encouraging, and Blaine deepens the kiss, grateful all over again that the universe had given him another chance with this boy. And when Kurt finally breaks the kiss, long moments later, to whisper a suggestion about pools and swim suits, he knows for sure he blamed too much on the heat.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was not supposed to exist. It was supposed to be a fun purple-prose writing exercise, but then a plot bunny showed up and followed me home. Many thanks to my incomparable RL fiance (now husband!) and beta, mtonbury, who had the patience to read and offer suggestions and be generally supportive despite being one of the hardest-core Kurt/Sam shippers in existence. Love you, babe! 
> 
> Originally published 6/20/11


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